Amazon Phone Interview: Format, Questions and Prep

What Amazon's own prep pages say about the phone screen for each role, the questions it publishes, one worked answer and a one-week plan.

An Amazon phone interview is usually a 45- to 60-minute call on Zoom or Amazon Chime. Amazon's FAQ says it may be with a recruiter, a potential peer or a senior leader on the hiring team, and covers behavioral questions built on the Leadership Principles, plus role-specific questions for some jobs. Most Amazon role prep pages that include one describe 60 minutes with a senior leader, often half behavioral, half functional or technical. There may be one or two phone interviews. Prepare six to eight true stories with numbers, plus the role-specific half.

For every kind of phone interview, from the hiring manager call to the technical screen, and how to come across well on audio alone, see our guide to sounding strong in a phone interview.

What the phone screen looks like, by role

Read side by side, Amazon's role prep pages show that "the phone screen" means different things for different jobs.

Role (Amazon prep page) — Who you talk to — Length — What fills the time
Product, marketing, program and vendor manager — A senior leader — 60 min — Half behavioral, half functional questions on your experience in that field
Customer success manager — A potential peer or a senior leader — 60 min — Behavioral plus functional questions, including business scenarios
Legal roles — A potential peer or a senior leader — 45 min — Behavioral plus hypothetical questions; a writing exercise may follow
Software development manager — A senior leader — 60 min — Half behavioral, half system design (a new system or one you have delivered)
SDE III — A senior leader — 60 min — Half behavioral, half coding and system design
Front-end engineer — A leader on the team — 60 min — Half behavioral, half front-end coding
Product manager, technical (PM-T) — A senior leader — 60 min — Half behavioral, half the technical product life cycle
Technical program manager — A senior leader — 60 min — Behavioral, situational and technical questions
Business intelligence engineer, applied and research scientist, security engineer — A senior leader — 60 min, one or two screens depending on the role — Behavioral and technical (SQL for BIEs; secure code review for some security roles)

Two things stand out. First, for most roles the behavioral half is not a warm-up before the "real" questions: it is half the call. Second, not every role has a phone screen. Amazon's SDE II page lists the steps as application, online assessment, interview loop and outcome, with no phone screen in between, so at that level the online assessment, not a call, is the first test. Steps vary by role, so confirm yours with your recruiter.

Logistics Amazon spells out

Platform. Despite the name, Amazon uses Amazon Chime or Zoom for phone interviews and recommends joining from a computer. Your recruiter says which one; test it beforehand.
Video. Instructions vary by role and stage, so follow your recruiter's or scheduler's guidance.
Setup. A quiet place, a reliable connection, a headset with a microphone, your resume, and paper and a pen.
No calendar invite. Amazon says it does not send calendar invitations, for confidentiality reasons; the schedule arrives by email. Check your junk folder.
Transcription. Some Zoom-enabled interviews use AI transcription, only if you consented in your Amazon AI preferences. Amazon says it is voluntary, does not affect your evaluation, and can be turned off mid-interview if you ask.
A second interviewer. On remote interviews, a second Amazonian may shadow to learn; Amazon says it does not affect the outcome.
After. Amazon aims to reply within two business days of the phone interview, and the whole process takes three to six weeks on average.

The behavioral questions to prepare

Amazon's phone-screening page publishes five example questions, the best evidence of what you will be asked. The principle mapping below is my reading, not Amazon's; Amazon's FAQ says it cannot tell you which principles will come up and treats all 16 as equally important.

1. Tell me about a time when you were faced with a problem that had a number of possible solutions. What was the problem and how did you determine the course of action? What was the outcome?

Tests judgment (Are Right, A Lot). Name the options you actually weighed, your criteria, and why you rejected the others. Admit what you did not know at the time.

2. When did you take a risk, make a mistake, or fail? How did you respond, and how did you grow?

Tests ownership and self-awareness. Amazon's prep pages say it is fine to be self-critical here. Pick a real miss, own your part, and spend most of the answer on what you changed afterwards.

3. Describe a time you took the lead on a project.

Tests Ownership, and for individual contributors, leading without the title. Make clear why it was yours to lead, and what would have happened if you had not.

4. What did you do when you needed to motivate a group of people or promote collaboration on a project?

Tests influence (Earn Trust). Name the person or group that was not on board, what you did to bring them in, and the result.

5. How have you used data to develop a strategy?

Tests Dive Deep. Amazon calls itself data-driven and asks for metrics wherever they apply. Worked answer below.

Amazon's customer success manager page adds three more that work for almost any role: a time you pushed back against a decision that affected your team (Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit), your most challenging project, and a time you worked under a tight deadline. Add "Why Amazon?", which Amazon itself calls a common question, and you have nine prompts that cover most of the behavioral half.

Worked answer: "How have you used data to develop a strategy?"

This example is illustrative; the numbers stand in for your own.

Situation: I ran support operations for a subscription product. Ticket volume was rising and leadership wanted to hire six more agents.

Task: Before approving headcount, my manager asked me to find out whether volume could be reduced instead.

Action: I tagged three months of tickets by cause and found about a third came from one billing screen. I shared the breakdown with the product manager, wrote help-centre articles for the top five billing questions, linked them from that screen, and tracked weekly volume by tag.

Result: Billing tickets fell by about half over the next quarter, and we hired two agents instead of six. The tagging became a weekly report the product team still uses. In hindsight I would have involved the product manager earlier, because the screen fix outlasted the articles.

Why it works: the data led to a decision (fewer hires), every action is "I", the result has numbers, and the last line shows reflection. What weakens it: a dashboard with no decision attached, "we" throughout, or a result you cannot measure. Amazon suggests pausing after an answer to ask whether the interviewer wants more context, and says to expect follow-up questions, so know who disagreed and what you would change.

The role-specific half

What Amazon's pages say to expect:

Coding (SDE III, front-end). Amazon's SDE III page asks for syntactically correct code, not pseudocode, and lists the questions interviewers ask themselves: did you find most of the bugs, consider alternate approaches and edge cases, test your own code, use language idioms correctly, and is the code correct and efficient? It also says to ask clarifying questions, think aloud and state complexity. The front-end page says phone screenings tend not to be as in-depth as interview loops. For practice problems, see our Amazon LeetCode guide.
System design (SDM). An ambiguous prompt such as "Build me an Uber-like App", where Amazon wants you to work backwards from business needs, or a deep dive into a system you have delivered. A sample question: how do you monitor the operational health of services?
SQL (BIE). Amazon's samples include: "Give me a query that shows how many units I received per week, for the past year." The page says to seek clarification even when the question seems clear. Here that means asking which date counts as "received", when a week starts, and whether weeks with no receipts should appear as zero, before you write anything.
Functional (managers, CSM). The CSM page says scenario questions have no single right answer: walk through your reasoning, the stakeholders you would consult and the data you would check.

Amazon's prep pages also say to avoid confidential information in your examples. If exact figures are sensitive, describing them in general terms is one way to follow that.

A one-week prep plan

Day 1: Find your role's prep page on Amazon's interviewing hub and note what the second half of the screen covers. Ask your recruiter if unsure whether the role counts as technical.
Day 2: Read the 16 Leadership Principles. Amazon says there is no need to memorise them; mark the six to eight the job description leans on.
Days 3–4: Write one STAR story per marked principle, using recent work where you can, as Amazon suggests. Put a number in every result, and include one failure and one disagreement.
Day 5: Practise the role-specific half: timed coding without an IDE, one system design, SQL or functional scenarios out loud.
Day 6: Tell every story to a friend on a call, about two minutes each, and let them ask "why?" twice.
Day 7: Test Chime or Zoom and your headset, print your resume, and write two or three questions for the interviewer about the team and the role.

If you are drafting your stories anyway, Verve AI Interview Copilot lets you save each one as a STAR entry in its Knowledge Base, and its suggestions draw on the documents you switch on. For later rounds, see the Amazon interview question bank guide, Amazon Area Manager interview questions for operations roles, and the Amazon question bank.

Sources

Process stages (online application, assessments, phone screening, interview loop): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/interviewing-at-amazon
Phone screening page: behavioral-based questions, no brain teasers, the five example questions, focus on the question asked, metrics, recent situations, Zoom or Chime, setup (quiet place, computer, resume, paper and pen, headset), transcription only for some Zoom interviews with consent, update within two business days (text sits in the page's collapsed sections): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/phone-screening
FAQ, interview process: one or two phone interviews via Chime or Zoom, update within two business days, process three to six weeks on average, steps vary by role, video instructions vary by role and stage, transcription voluntary and does not affect evaluation, can be turned off mid-interview: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/faq/interview-process
FAQ, interview prep: phone interview may be with a recruiter, potential peer or senior leader; behavioral questions on the Leadership Principles plus functional or role-specific competencies; Chime or Zoom; computer recommended; cannot specify which principles, all equally important: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/faq/interview-prep
FAQ, scheduling: no calendar invitations for confidentiality reasons; schedule by email: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/faq/scheduling
Remote interviews: Amazon asks for video in remote interviews: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/remote-interview
Interview meeting platforms (Zoom, Amazon Chime): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/remote-interview/platforms
Interview loop page: "Why Amazon?" is a common question; pause after your answer and ask if the interviewer wants more context: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/interview-loop
The 16 Leadership Principles: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles
Product manager phone screen (senior leader, 60 minutes, half behavioral, half functional; process with phone screening and writing assessment; failure questions, metrics, follow-ups; avoid confidential information; no need to memorise the principles): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/product-manager-interview-prep
Marketing manager phone screen: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/marketing-manager-interview-prep
Program manager phone screen: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/program-manager-interview-prep
Vendor manager phone screen: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/vendor-manager-interview-prep
Customer success manager phone screen, functional scenario questions, three sample questions: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/csm-interview-prep
Legal roles phone screen (45 minutes, hypothetical questions, writing exercise): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/legal-roles-interview-prep
Software development manager technical phone screen, system design prompt and sample questions: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sdm-interview-prep
SDE III technical phone screen, coding tips and the questions interviewers ask themselves, no pseudocode: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sde-iii-interview-prep
SDE II process (application, online assessment, interview loop, outcome): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sde-ii-interview-prep
Front-end engineer technical phone screen; phone screenings tend not to be as in-depth as loops: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/fee-interview-prep
Product manager, technical phone screen: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/pm-t-interview-prep
Technical program manager phone screen: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/tpm-interview-prep
BIE technical phone screens (one or two, 60 minutes, SQL, sample questions, seek clarification; second Amazonian may shadow remote interviews): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/bie-interview-prep
Applied scientist technical phone screens: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/applied-scientist-interview-prep
Research scientist technical phone screens: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/research-scientist-interview-prep
Security engineer technical phone screens and secure code review: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/security-engineer-interview-prep
Verve Knowledge Base STAR entries and documents switched on or off: https://docs.vervecopilot.com/features/knowledge-base